Over the last decade many metaheuristics have been applied to the flowshop scheduling problem, ranging from Simulated Annealing or Tabu Search to complex hybrid techniques. Some of these methods provide excellent effectiveness and efficiency at the expense of being utterly complicated. In fact, several published methods require substantial implementation efforts, exploit problem specific speed-...

In this paper, we examine the use of biased neighborhood structures for local search in multiobjective memetic algorithms. Under a biased neighborhood structure, each neighbor of the current solution has a different probability to be sampled in local search. In standard local search, all neighbors of the current solution usually have the same probability because they are randomly sampled. On th...

This paper introduces an automated approach called OSCAR that combines algorithm portfolios and online algorithm selection. The goal of algorithm portfolios is to construct a subset of algorithms with diverse problem solving capabilities. The portfolio is then used to select algorithms from for solving a particular (set of) instance(s). Traditionally, algorithm selection is usually performed in...

This paper investigates the hybrid flowshop scheduling with finite intermediate buffers, whose objective is to minimize the sum of weighted completion time of all jobs. Since this problem is very complex and has been proven strongly NP-hard, a tabu search heuristic is proposed. In this heuristic there are two main features. One is that a scatter search mechanism is incorporated to improve the d...

This chapter addresses three main problems of the production planning area: Single Machine Scheduling (SMS), Parallel Machine Scheduling (PMS) and Flowshop Scheduling (FS). Many situations in production environments found in industries around the world can be modelled as one or a set of them (Baker 1974). It is easy to find dozens of problem variants in the literature due to different productio...

although several papers have studied no-idle scheduling problems, they all focus on flow shops, assuming one processor at each working stage. but, companies commonly extend to hybrid flow shops by duplicating machines in parallel in stages. this paper considers the problem of scheduling no-idle hybrid flow shops. a mixed integer linear programming model is first developed to mathematically form...

The assembly flowshop scheduling problem has been addressed recently in the literature. There are many problems that can be modeled as assembly flowshop scheduling problems including queries scheduling on distributed database systems and computer manufacturing. The problem has been addressed with respect to either makespan or total completion time criterion in the literature. In this paper, we ...

This paper proposes two variants of heuristic algorithms to solve the classic permutation flowshop scheduling problem. Both algorithms are simple and very efficient. The first algorithm is a constructive heuristic which builds the optimal schedule of jobs on the basis of a selective-greedy process. To escape the trap of local optimum points, for the second heuristic algorithm a stochastic featu...

The hybrid or flexible flowshop problem is a generalization of the flowshop in such a way that every job can be processed by one among several machines on each machine stage. In recent years a number of effective exact methods have been developed. A major reason for this progress is the development of new job and machine based lower bounds as well as the rapidly increasing importance of constra...